Obama to Consider Executive Actions on Gun Violence

President Obama will meet with Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch on Monday to discuss what he can do to curb gun violence, sidestepping an entrenched Congress.

In his first weekly radio address of the new year on Friday, Mr. Obama said he would talk to Ms. Lynch after a monthslong examination of the measures he can take on his own to halt what he called “our epidemic of gun violence.”

Recalling the 2012 school shooting in Newtown, Conn., that killed 26 people — 20 of them children — and left many grimly hopeful it would initiate a change in the nation’s gun laws, the president criticized lawmakers for bowing to the gun lobby and blocking necessary reforms.

“All across America, survivors of gun violence and those who lost a child, a parent, a spouse to gun violence are forced to mark such awful anniversaries every single day,” Mr. Obama said. “And yet Congress still hasn’t done anything to prevent what happened to them from happening to other families.”

Mass shooting after mass shooting, Mr. Obama has repeated a call for improved gun safety restrictions, most recently after the rampage in San Bernardino, Calif., that left 14 people dead and 21 injured. A bipartisan effort in 2013 to bolster gun control measures after the Newtown shooting was halted in the Senate, failing to garner the 60 votes needed to expand background checks and ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

Facing the reality that lawmakers are unlikely to strengthen the country’s gun laws anytime soon, the administration has been looking at ways Mr. Obama can tighten gun sales unilaterally, focusing in particular on who could be considered a high-volume dealer for an executive action that could expand background checks.

But White House officials have said there are many political and legal challenges to doing so, potentially opening up Mr. Obama to renewed criticism that he is abusing his authority.

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